Babette Smith

Smith died on 22 November 2021 from endometrial cancer. She was survived by her son, Joshua. Following her funeral and cremation, her ashes were scattered up near Palm Beach lighthouse, in the same location as her parents.

The Mitchell Library at the State Library of New South Wales holds two collections of her papers (25 boxes) covering her research, writing and employment. Jeannine Baker interviewed Smith in 2018, with the recording held by the National Film and Sound Archive.

Smith was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 2015 Queen's Birthday Honours for "service to the community, particularly as an historian and author". The Luck of the Irish won the 2015 NSW Premier's Prize for Regional and Community history and was shortlisted for the Australian Historical Association’s Kay Daniels award for excellence in research in 2016. Recognising the importance of her career and contributions to Australian colonial history, she was awarded the Annual History Citation by the NSW History Council in 2021 shortly after her death.

She was a member of the Australian Republican Movement and served on its NSW Committee for two years. She was invited to present the 2009 Russel Ward Annual Lecture at the University of New England.

Babette served as chief executive of the NSW Bar Association from 1993 to 1997, the first woman to do so. She worked as a mediator for Legal Aid, Strata Titles and Farm Debt. She was also an official visitor for Corrective Services NSW, working out of Silverwater and Lithgow jails.

After the birth of her son in 1977, Babette took up a family tree that her father had begun: family lore suggested that there was a convict somewhere. Following the maternal line, she found that there was indeed a convict, Susannah Watson. She was lucky enough to discover Susannah’s letters to one of the daughters she was forced to leave behind in England. Convicted for stealing to feed her family, Susannah made the most of life in Australia, which she described as a plentiful country. She lived to old age and her Australian-born son Charles Isaac Watson founded newspapers. Susannah’s letters are now in the Mitchell Library.

Babette Alison Smith OAM (2 April 1942 – 22 November 2021) was an Australian colonial historian, mediator and business executive. She wrote books about the convicts transported to Australia.

Born 2 April 1942, Babette Alison Smith (nee Macfarlan) was the daughter of Bruce Panton Macfarlan and Barbara Macfarlan (nee Scott). Her father Bruce saw active service as a Group Captain in the RAAF during WWII, was a barrister and later served as a judge in the Supreme Court of New South Wales. Babette spent her early school years at SCEGGS Redlands, and in 1955 she became a boarder at Frensham, Mittagong. After leaving school, she completed a BA at the University of Sydney while working at the Supreme Court as a judge’s associate to her father.

Babette's first book, A Cargo of Women, grew from this discovery that her great-great-grandmother, Susannah Watson, was a convict transported to Australia in 1829. A Cargo of Women is a work of great originality, combining Susannah’s story with the lives of 99 other prisoners on the Princess Royal. Scholarship and narrative flair are the hallmarks of Babette Smith’s work. For her, convict women were neither whores nor society’s victims, but individuals doing their best in very tough times. In Australia’s Birthstain she examined the role of homophobia in attitudes to male convicts; in The Luck of the Irish she followed a cohort of male prisoners.